Turning my face towards the Light

I'm sitting with the laptop and the kitty on my lap, and I just realized that it's already 12:30 a.m.. Oh well, I didn't make it to sleep early tonight!

Today (or yesterday, actually!) we celebrated my oldest daughter's 11th birthday. Her birthday was early in February, but for various reasons we weren't able to have a birthday party with her friends until now. This morning I loaded up the van with my daughter, four of her friends from school, and one of the kids' mother, and we drove to Monterey. My husband and younger daughter drove down as well (we couldn't all fit in one vehicle). We spent most of the day in a crush of bodies at the Monterey Bay Aquarium (the great white shark is incredible!), followed by a short romp on a very windy beach, then came home. It was exhausting, occasionally frustrating, and very fun. I think it's going to take me quite a while to get all the popcorn out of the cracks and crevasses of my van...

I've just been sitting thinking tonight about how my life has turned out so different than I ever expected it to. While there have been many hard things to adjust to in the last few years, I can see how good most of this has been for me. I am feeling worn out, though, and tired of the struggles and the anxiety. Anxiety was not something I ever expected to struggle with, and I've only begun to really recognize it's presence in my life. One of the side effects of anxiety has been that I am having a hard time reading books. I can read blogs and surf the net just fine! But to really sit still, focus, read, listen and absorb a book has been really hard. I've been trying to read Parker Palmer's Let your Life Speak for months, and it's been very slow going (and it's not a long book!). What I've absorbed so far has been very good, though, so I'm gonna keep trying.

I've spent hours over the last few days, perusing university and California education websites, looking into options for possibly starting to teach. This is so challenging. I'm not sure what parts of me are driven by true desire, or by anxiety about our circumstances and grasping for solutions. Actually, I think it's a combination of all those things, and more. Working with kids these last few weeks has been a real pleasure, though, a gift. I just wish I could have some idea of what was the "right" path for now, for next week, for the next year... Living with the ambiguity, with the unknown, with only knowing what I am doing today and maybe tomorrow, is hard. It's forced me to examine my faith like nothing else ever has done, though, and turn my face towards the Light.